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posted by martyb on Friday November 14 2014, @01:55PM   Printer-friendly

The journal Nature has a story on new information obtained by re-processing Voyager2 data.

Erich Karkoschka, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, chased down the new detail by comparing 1,600 images taken by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft during a flyby in 1986. “To me it felt like there was a new space mission to Uranus,” he said. “I applied new image-processing techniques so I could see features that other people couldn't see.”

This reprocessing has uncovered an unusual and unexpected rotational pattern in the atmosphere, which could give clues on the internal structure of the planet.

The story is also covered at Universe Today, and University of Arizona News.

There is a vast amount of raw data publicly available from NASA's National Space Science Data Center, and from the UAnews link:

Karkoschka's work illustrates the scientific value that can be gleaned from data that have been around for a long time, available to anyone with Internet access. He had similar success when he investigated 13-year-old Voyager images of Uranus’ surroundings and discovered the satellite Perdita.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 14 2014, @02:18PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday November 14 2014, @02:18PM (#115900) Homepage
    In the uanews vid, why do all the patterns in the clouds all move at exactly the same rotational speed? Thats not how planetary fluid dynamics works. There should be bands, stationary regions, and even counter-rotating eddies. Seems more like an "artist's impression" than anything corresponding to reality.
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